New ‘Uber for Women’ Service Promises Safety From Sexual Assault

But is it sexist?

Many women love Uber for its convenience, but the idea of getting in a car with a stranger can give many pause – especially after a spate of recent headlines of sexual assault and rape allegations against drivers in the company.

But now a new ride-sharing app for women aims to alleviate those fears. SafeHer — previously Chariots for Women — is a startup founded by an ex-Uber driver in Boston that plans to hire only female drivers who will pick up only female customers and boys under the age of 13.

The founder, Michael Pelletz, announced in February that he was launching the company and tells Teen Vogue that the idea for a safe, female-only ride sharing service came to him while picking up college-aged women from bars in the early hours of the morning in Boston, and him thinking how dangerous it was for them to be getting in cars with strange men. “I thought, 'Imagine if I were a predator.' It would be like a candy store,” Pelletz says. Then, after Pelletz had one particularly threatening encounter with an erratic passenger, he says he knew he had to do something. The man was passing out and waking up, fidgeting around the backseat, and kept reaching for something in his pocket.

“I thought he could rob me. So I found two policemen and asked if they could see what was wrong with him,” Pelletz says. “I was freaked out, and I thought, imagine if that was my wife or another woman, and all these incidents I’d heard about came back to me and I said, 'I need to fix this.'”

However, some find the whole premise insulting — with the implication that women are incapable of protecting themselves, and so need their own dedicated car service to get around town. One female Uber driver, writing anonymously in an online forum for the company’s drivers, said she was “insulted by the idea that I, as a woman driver, am 'not safe' driving men around. I am perfectly capable of driving both men and woman around — I do not need some company to protect me from male passengers.”

She continued, “It’s obvious to me that some guy thought this would be a great idea but manages to insult women in the process. This is a classic example of benevolent sexism — it is sexism all dressed up in 'protecting women' bullsh*t'.” Still, Pelletz is convinced that this is a service that women everywhere need; he says women getting assaulted "is the reality of the world."

According to Pelletz, SafeHer will only hire female drivers who have passed the most thorough background checks available — which he claims are more thorough than the ones Uber and Lyft use — and will have to answer security questions each time they start a shift. The app will also use a safe word that both the rider and the driver must use before the ride can begin, according to the company’s site. But while the company touts its safety protocols, some legal experts say the women-only policy could be discriminatory and even illegal.

“Companies that provide a service need to accept potential customers without discriminating,” attorney Dahlia C. Rudavsky told The Boston Globe.

“For gender, it’s not enough to say, ‘we really just want to have a female here because our customers prefer that to feel safer,’” Joseph L. Sulman, an employment law specialist, told The Globe. “There’s nothing wrong with advertising particularly to a female customer base,” Rudavsky said. “But if a company goes further and refuses to pick up a man, I think they’d potentially run into legal trouble.”

Pelletz says he welcomes any legal challenges that are brought against SafeHer. In fact, the founder says boldly that he could see any claims of discrimination going all the way to the Supreme Court, and has a staff of lawyers whom he hopes will be able to win a case and cement for women the right to safe travel. “There is such inequality when it comes to ride shares,” he says. “We’re not trying to discriminate against anybody. All we’re trying to do is offer a safe place for women to travel without being harassed and assaulted.”

Pelletz's concerns that inspired his business aren't completely unfounded. A recent report by BuzzFeed last month, for example, shows that the company's complaint filing system has almost 12,000 results for the words "sexual assault" and "rape." Uber responded to the BuzzFeed story with an open letter on Medium, in which it said it received only five claims of rape and 170 "legitimate" claims of sexual assault to its customer service files between December 2012 and August 2015. Uber also suggested a number of reasons that the search results for rape that were leaked to Buzzfeed were higher than its own internal count: users who misspelled words like “rate” in their customer service tickets as “rape,” had the letters r-a-p-e in their names or email addresses, or filed complaints about cars that weren’t actually Uber-affiliated or were discussing media reports they’d heard. They also may have been using the word “rape” in another context, the company said. “For example, ‘you raped my wallet,’” Uber executives, including chief safety officer Joe Sullivan, wrote in the letter.

But the numbers do lend some credence to recent headlines about Uber drivers, and men posing as drivers for the company, taking advantage of female customers. Those incidents have been documented and compiled by a campaign called “Who’s Driving You,” that’s supported by the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association, a trade group representing taxi drivers. (It should be noted that Uber’s business model is putting many of these companies out of business.) The contents of “Who’s Driving You,” however, don't disqualify women from being able to protect themselves, attack female drivers, or even attack male drivers.

Cindy Southworth, founder of the Safety Net Technology project at the
National Network to End Domestic Violence and a member of Uber’s safety advisory board, said that many of the features of Uber also increase women’s safety. These include the ability to match the license plate on the car with the one shown in the app, and the feature that allows you to share your estimated time of arrival so that someone always knows where you are.

“That also goes for a lot of female Uber drivers,” she tells Teen Vogue. “The system knows there is someone in the car, so if something does happen there is always accountability.” She also feels confident knowing she can report aggressive behavior through a low-rating on the app to create a record that could lead to a driver’s dismissal. She also points out that women have long been getting harassed and assaulted by taxi drivers. “I’m excited about all the ways technology can increase safety,” she says.

SafeHer originally planned to launch this week in Boston and then expand nationally, but with all of the interest generated since the company’s announcement earlier this month, Pelletz says he is delaying the launch until upgrades can be made to the app. He now hopes it will launch in the fall.